as of August the 8th 2018, we counted the 1,000,000th visitor at our oldest project, cipha.net!

It’s amazing in regarding the fact that we installed this counter back in 2006, when we ported the project from Greymatter to WordPress. Unfortunately, because this was an indie underground project, we never had the mood, time or resources to count visitors from 2001 on, when the project went live, to the aforementioned date.

What’s interesting too is: the number mentioned and the counter which you can still see live in action on the website on the lower right corner, these are really visitors, not page views. In this day and age both KPIs (key performance indicators) are confused very often. What a pity, the web is 27 years old now…

In page views, we are nearing the five million mark: right now it’s showing us 4,915,471.

We still want to thank anyone who still visits this intergalactic anthology antiquity!

To be honest and that’s what impresses us even more here: cipha.net isn’t our first project to reach the infamous one million visitors mark.

The first project which achieved this milestone for us was zockerseele.com, our video game blog. It happened on April the 11th, 2011.

The counter here was implemented right from the start in 2005, shortly after we aquired the URL and published the system along with its first entry. So what we see here as counter data in the first sidebar is really what’s rolling in since the project was born.

zockerseele.com will also be our first project to reach the 2,000,000 visitors milestone. Right now we’re at 1,955,981. And due to financial and time problems we almost update nothing there anymore. In page views, zockerseele.com is even more impressing: 17,655,816. Never in our dreams would we have imagined to do a “no budget web project” with such figures…

We don’t know when but the party will be joined by gizmeo.eu, our gadget blog, as the counter there is somewhere in the 250,000s. As you may have read between the lines above this may take ages.

But hey, that’s how indie projects work! <3

Today we’re going to celebrate a little: if you like join us in Lisbon, most of the time you’ll find us roaming the streets around Bairro Alto or Costa da Caparica. We’re even sometimes visiting the small beaches in Cascais when we’re drunk, haha! Well, due to the fact that we have to get there by train this doesn’t happen very often. Of course we can’t guarantee that we’re still alive when you see or meet us but we’re living the indie dream and touching is explicitly allowed! <3 Just be prepared for a incalculable reaction. 😉

The term “weblog” was coined at the end of 1997 by Jorn Barger. The first web service offering weblogs for an individual was Blogger in 1999, today a property of Google Inc.. However, it took until 2003 that this word was taken as a standard for this kind of medium by mainstream media. This means, all who did have a weblog before 2003, be happy: You may call yourself avant-garde!

A weblog has different core features which distinguish it from other forms of online publications, e.g. online forums:

chronological, newest is on top of the web page

comments for each entry

links to monthly archives

categories for entries

search function (although shared with other online mediums, of course)

embeddable media, like images, videos, etc. these were primarly created manually by html tags

In fact, what we use, especially with WordPress or Drupal, these are complete suites which we call today CMS, content management systems. Always backed by a database, e.g. MySQL or MariaDB, which can become very huge over a certain period of time.

From weblogs it was only a small step to the often critised (but important and honest) “citizen journalism”. As you may read up, this wasn’t new either, what was completely new was the fact that an individual, or a group of individuals, could do this online and, hypothetically, reach the whole world. For not spending a penny at all, in the case of Blogger for example.

Today, blogs are everywhere: Be it a corporation displaying news in this form, in a “1-click-publishing-form” like Tumblr, or something else. In different states, e.g. Saudi-Arabia, to this day, Bloggers are executed for telling stories about their reality online.

Blogs may protect freedom of speech anywhere, but they may also be used as a weapon for hatred, like seen in European states where right-wing parties flourish since a couple of years. As always, it’s a double-sided sword. Never forget, that it’s the history of the Internet itself which makes them so.

As you can see: Starting is as easy as at the end of the 90s. What we do here at AETHYX MEDIAE is not that different: All we do is giving you the opportunity to use your own domain for your own medium, your own weblog, your own CMS. And if you didn’t hide under stones in the 90s or early 2000s, you should already own and know what a domain is, right?

We use WordPress since 2005 with success and although we read from time to time it has “flaws”, never experienced one problem with it. It became very powerful, very extensible over time, maybe like a labyrinth for starters.

We want to help you in navigating through this labyrinth! As you may see after a couple of months, or maybe even only weeks, this can be a helluva fun! We even set up WordPress for free when you are age 14 or under! Just have a look what we offer right now, we are sure there is something for anyone:

Feel free to contact us anytime, 24/7! We even accept Bitcoin for those who want to stay anonymous!

We think today it’s more important than ever to be an active individual or organization. You know what the proverb says: What doesn’t go with time, goes after some time. And we don’t think you want, or should, go forever. 😉

* 1 domain name of your choice for free
* 5GB webspace (NEW!)
* Unlimited traffic
* 50 Email accounts with Email-Spamfilter (NEW!)
* 10 subdomains (NEW!)
* newest version of WordPress, the state of the art CMS, preinstalled (1 MySQL database included, of course)
* choose up to 10 plugins you like from here: https://aethyx.eu/eshop/ OR choose up to ten from http://wordpress.org/plugins/. We configure anything and make them run
* installation of your own custom theme from inside your new WordPress OR choose one from http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/
* installation of your own independent counter for free (see expCounter for details). If you prefer Piwik, we can install that too, but it’s more restrictive in counting visitors
* fast & reliable servers located in Germany
* servers are 100% powered from renewable energy ressources
* 1 cron job included (to be fair, not from within your webspace directory, but from your web URL) (NEW!)
* brand new SSL certificate 99€/domain per year or 159€ for 2 years OR, if you already have one, this will cost 30€/year for installation and maintaining
* but: SSL over proxy is included for free (NEW!)
* price: 5€/month (terminable to the end of any month)

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As you can see, we pimped everything and you will not pay one more cent for it! 🙂 The most interesting part for you will be that the webspace alone was increased by 400%! Yay!

As already stated: This offer will end as soon as 10 new customers are found. So don’t hesitate, just drop us a line: info[at]aethyx.eu!